Behind The Mask
by Fyrie
Summary: Neville finds out just who was behind the mask of "Mad-eye" Moody, leading to some serious contemplations about his past and childhood.


Behind The Mask

Notes: As always, this idea was roiling around in my head and then decided to spring to life when I was trying to sleep, at 3.45am. Have to love mornings, you really do. I wish I'd scribbled this down, then, but silly me thought I would remember it all. Ah well, this is what I remember.

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I know I wasn't meant to find out, but I did.

It's funny, y'know. In Hogwarts, things that are meant to be kept quiet never are. I mean, the Chamber of Secrets. Meant to be secret looking at the name, right? Then how come everyone knew about it?

The same could be said about the teachers and their control of situations.

Or people who are supposed to be teachers.

It... I don't want to believe it.

I mean, the bloke was one of the only teachers who did anything nice for me. He took me aside one day, a bad day, and told me I wasn't a failure like everyone said, that I wasn't worthless, that I did get good grades and that I could be successful.

He was decent. Good to me.

That's why I don't want to believe the rumours, but the problem is that in Hogwarts is that rumours usually turn out to have some kind of truth in them and I realy wish it wasn't this.

First, Mad-Eye Moody wasn't really Moody.

It was someone else disguised as him.

Looking at the real Moody at the feast, I can see that, which is kind of scary. He looks like he'd hex anyone who even breathed in his direction, nothing like the strong bloke who was teaching us all year.

It was the someone who was meant to be disguised as him...

The someone who was carried out of the school, bound for Azkaban.

Bartemius Crouch Junior.

Oh, I've heard that name.

I've heard and hated that name most of my life.

Not that anyone knew about it, not even my Gran.

Mind you, Gran doesn't think I remember mum and dad... before. 

I do remember. 

I remember the night I went to stay with Gran, when mummy and dad were going to have a nice meal for Valentine's day. I remember pretending to be asleep when I heard a scream from my Gran later that night. I remember her coming to my room and sitting on my bed and crying.

My Gran never cries, so strong and tough, so I pretended to still be asleep.

She stroked my hair and kept on whispering that I would be safe and that she would look after me. 

The next morning, she tried to explain to a confused four-year-old just why mummy and dad wouldn't be looking after me anymore. They had become very sick and they would have to stay in hospital.

I understood that, asked if I could see them, and she started crying again. I don't think I've ever really been more scared in my life than when I saw my battle-axe of a Grandmother crumble in tears.

She lifted me into her lap and hugged me, smelling of mothballs and that smell that every old lady seems to have. She kept on crying and telling me I was being her brave little man, that everything would be all right and we would be fine.

I don't know what it was, but seeing her like that told me nothing would ever be quite right again.

I wasn't allowed to see them, either. 

At least, not until I was old enough to 'understand'.

So I waited and that's when I first heard the name I came to hate.

One night, only a week or so after I was told mummy and daddy wouldn't be coming back, I heard raised voices downstairs in the middle of the night, my Gran talking to two someones.

Slipping out of my bed, teddy in arm, I snuck downstairs and made my way to the living room door, peeking around the crack, where I could see two people in travelling robes sitting on the settee.

They were talking about a 'trial' and whether Gran would be there.

It sounded very boring to me, but I was only four.

"They'll be sent to Azkaban," one of the men said to my Gran. I'd heard about Azkaban. It was one of the extreme threats that Gran used to use on Uncle Algie when he was acting up. Not often, but enough to scare him.

Gran was hidden from me by the back of her massive chair beside the fireplace. "I don't understand this," she said to them. "You... Surely young Barty... he and Frank knew each other..."

"I'm afraid Bartemius Crouch Junior is one of the chief suspects of the attack on your son," the man replied.

It got very boring again, after that, both men droning on about unfamiliar names and big words I didn't understand being used.

So, I toddled back to my bed, chewing on my teddy bear's ear as I curled under the blankets. Somewhere at the back of my mind, the name Bartemius Crouch Junior was carefully filed away.

I didn't hate him then.

Not at that point, anyway, because I didn't know what had happened.

It was when I saw my parents - or what was left of them - for the first time that I found out what it was to really hate someone.

I was five and I was getting scared that my Gran was lying and that my parents were dead. I had a temper tantrum at school, which turned into more of a hysterical fit, that resulted in Gran taking me home, screaming.

That night, she sat down in her big, winged chair, lifted me into her lap and told me that my mummy and dad were still in hospital because some nasty people had done some very bad magic called 'Cruciatus' on them and hurt them a lot. 

She said that she would take me to see them, but I shouldn't be scared, because they wouldn't hurt me.

Scared of my parents.

I didn't think that it would be possible, but it was.

Gran was holding my hand when we went into the ward where they were.

There was a strange smell in the ward. I still remember it. It was sweet, a very sickly smell, and it made me feel like I was going to be sick. It still does, when I visit them, even now.

Then I saw my mummy.

If I hadn't been so scared of the surroundings, I would have run to her, but I was utterly petrified. Maybe it's a good thing I didn't run to her, because when we got close enough, it was like looking at a dummy in a shop window.

She was sitting in the bed, blankets tucked neatly around her, her hands twisted up in a strange position against her chest.

She looked just like my mummy, the mummy I remembered, the mummy who would kiss me, stroke my hair and tuck me in at night, but her eyes were glassy, empty, and her mouth hung open, drool trickling onto the nightshirt she was wearing.

Gran didn't say anything, as I stood and stared at the thing that my mother had become. Her large, aged hand around mine was comforting and when I started to cry, she had knelt and gathered me up in her arms.

Seeing dad was worse.

He was in a room with padded walls for his own safety. 

He could still talk a little, but it only came out in babbled spurts of random words, his eyes unfocused and his hands constantly moving and twitching. Bandages on his scalp were there to cover the self-inflicted wounds from his shaking hands.

Rocking and gibbering, he looked nothing like my dad, the big, strong, smiling man who had been trying to teach me how to play Quidditch on a toy broomstick only months before.

We went home in silence.

I cried in Gran's lap all night.

That was when the nightmares started.

For nearly four years, I was haunted by visions of them, even though I made myself go and visit them and tried to - uselessly - convince myself that they were still my parents, no matter how insane they were.

I didn't let anyone know about the nightmares, though. I would wake up, crying in the middle of the night, and bury my head under the pillows so no one would hear me. I didn't want to upset Gran.

I can't remember when it was that I recalled Crouch's name.

Maybe it was when Gran was talking about the Ministry to Uncle Algie or something like that.

I just remember someone mentioning his dad, Bartemius Crouch Senior, at the dinner table and I suddenly remembered what I had heard that night when I was four and dropped the glass I was drinking from.

Uncle Algie laughed, while Gran berated me for not being more careful, as I hastily scrambled onto the floor and started picking up the pieces of glass, my hands shaking so much that I cut my fingers.

It was all starting to make sense.

Pieces of the puzzle fitting together.

Ever since I saw what had happened to my parents, I had wanted someone to blame, someone to hate for taking the mummy and dad I loved away from me, someone to direct my anger at.

A wizard had placed a curse called cruciatus on my parents. I didn't know what the curse did. I didn't know why it worked. Maybe it just made them go insane, just like that, or maybe it was worse. I had no clue.

Now, though, I knew who did it.

So, I hated.

I imagined what I would do, if I ever got a chance to meet this... wizard, the one who hurt my parents. I know it would make me as bad as him, but I imagined putting the cruciatus on him, just to send him mad too.

Just so he could feel half the pain that I felt, every time I looked at my mummy's empty face and my dad's unfocused eyes.

When I reached Hogwarts, the hate was still there, but no one knew about it, not even my Gran. I hid it well, behind a mask of complacency and cheerfulness.

She didn't know that I knew anything about what happened. She thinks that my knowledge stops at what she told me, but she didn't know that - in my mind - I had a shrine of hatred to a man I had never known.

It was pushed to the back of my mind, though, with the distractions that school posed with new people to get to know, although I knew I would never be able to completely trust anyone.

After all, my dad had been hurt the most by someone he had known, someone that he had trusted.

It wasn't helped by the fact that people in my classes kept putting spells on me: the leg-locker curse from an enemy, the full body bind from a so-called friend... it didn't exactly make me feel ready to jump up and trust everyone.

Still, I didn't have so much focused hate.

Not until this year, though.

This year as the year that my fantasy of placing the cruciatus curse on Bartemius Crouch Junior was violently crushed, when I saw exactly what that curse did and what it was capable of.

It...

It was just on a spider, but I...

Knowing that's what my parents went through...

I felt sick, dizzy, shocked, terrified, my vision blurring. The whole room seemed to have gotten very hot and I felt my head spinning with the shock at knowing just how much my parents must have suffered.

They had been hurt... horribly hurt by a simple spell, a word that without a wand would mean nothing... and me, in my naivety, had childishly imagined placing that same curse on the one who had hurt them like that. 

I had imagined it... becoming as bad as him as a fantasy.

Seeing that curse, I knew that it was beyond anything I had imagined.

It was beyond anything I would be able to do to anyone, even the one that I hated with all the strength in my heart.

That was when Moody offered me comfort, sympathy.

He took me to his office, gave me chocolate and spoke to me in a way that no teacher had ever spoken to me. He reassured me, said my parents would have been proud of me, pointed out that I wasn't a complete failure.

He told me that if I ever needed any help, I could go to him, that he'd be glad to help me out if I needed it. He was genuinely good to me, which made the revelation of his real identity even worse.

What's worse is that I... I actually liked him.

Even now, even when I know who he is, I still can't help remembering what he said to me affectionately, the supportive words so different to anything that other teachers would say to me.

Maybe he was just mocking me, silently scorning the fact that he knew who I was while I didn't have a clue about who he really was, about the invisible connection that we had through my parents.

Then again, maybe he did feel something...

Maybe he wanted to make amends for what happened.

I don't know.

All I do know is that the teacher that I admired and who I spoke to the most, the teacher I had come to trust and confide in was the exactly same man that my father trusted so many years ago, when he had opened his door to a friend...

I wish that I had known before, that I could have at least hit him, screamed at him, vented some of the hate I've been carrying for so long, but it's too late now.

Although it wasn't me that did it, the Dementor doing that job for me, Bartemius Crouch Junior is in the same condition that I wished him in for nearly seven years. He has been left a shell of a living man, a blank face his testament to the world.

I should feel some kind of relief, I know, knowing he'll never be able to hurt anyone like he hurt my parents again, but I don't. I still hate him and now, there's nothing I can do about it.

Some part of me wishes that I'd never found out, that I had been left with the illusion that the teacher I liked was a good, decent man.

Instead, I know that the man who worse than murdered my parents was the one to comfort me when he showed me exactly what he had done to them, his hand on my shoulder as he reassured me in a way that - by rights - my father should have.

I hate him and now, I can't even wish him dead, because it just wouldn't make a difference. I don't even have anything left to hate. He's where I wanted him to be and I should feel sated, better, satisfied.

I don't.

No matter what anyone says, nothing can take hate away, when you've embraced it for so long. Even though he's a glassy-eyed, soulless monster who will never harm anyone ever again, I know that I'll hate him until his or my dying day.


End file.
